In watching an earlier Democratic debate, I mentioned how surprised I was to see an ad featuring Ron Reagan, former president Reagan’s son, on behalf of the Freedom From Religion Foundation that argued for the separation of church and state. He began by describing himself as an “unabashed atheist” and ended with him declaring himself to be a ” lifelong atheist, not afraid of burning in hell.”
In general, I tend to be optimistic about the human condition but on occasion, I come across stories that shake that sense of positivity. The radio program The World had a segment on December 12th about the trauma suffered by content moderators tasked by Facebook with viewing videos on the site to see if they should be removed. Having to watch video after video of the most appalling things in rapid succession resulted in many of them suffering psychologically and Facebook did not seem to have in place sufficient resources to help them deal with it. Some of the moderators, who are contractors and not Facebook employees, are now suing Facebook. One of them Chris Gray, who worked in its Dublin office, was interviewed on the program.
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Recent events in the UK have resulted in a new word being added to the political lexicon and that is ‘Corbynizing’. This is the label given to the concerted effort orchestrated by the right wing Israel lobby in the UK, the Conservative party, much of the establishment media, and Blairite neoliberal members of the Labour party to discredit and undermine Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn by suggesting that he is an anti-Semite and/or a coddler of anti-Semites, in an effort to remove him from the party leadership and also to distract attention from the progressive platform that the party put forward.
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I wrote recently about how disconcerting it was when watching a film when the audio and video are not synchronized, so that the spoken words do not match up with the mouth movements of the speaker.
I recently watched a film where this problem was even more pronounced. It was an Italian film but they had dubbed it into English. Dubbing is usually bad and rarely done these days. When I was young in Sri Lanka, I recall seeing a number of so-called ‘spaghetti western’ films that were made in Italy that had one American star (like Clint Eastwood in the Man With No Name trilogy) or with Steve Reeves as various mythical heroes like Hercules, with the rest of the cast being Italian. So the star would speak in English but all the others in Italian with their voices dubbed in English. They were pretty bad.
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Mother Jones is the name by which Mary Harris Jones (1830-1930), a legendary union activist and organizer, was known. The nickname was given to her by the workers because of the caring way she dealt with them especially during strikes.
Known as the miner’s angel, Mother Jones became an active campaigner for the United Mine Workers Union. A political progressive, she was a founder of the Social Democratic Party in 1898. Jones also helped establish the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905. For all of her social reform and labor activities, she was considered by the authorities to be one of the most dangerous women in America.
Nothing could dissuade Mother Jones from her work. At the age of 82, she was arrested for her part in a West Virginia strike that turned violent and was sentenced to 20 years. But her supporters rallied and convinced the governor to grant her a pardon. Jones, undeterred, returned to organizing workers.
The right wing in the US have been on a campaign against first-term Minnesota Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, implying strongly that she is some sort of radical Muslim terrorist sympathizing anti-Semite while stopping short of actually saying so. In a profile of her in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of The Progressive magazine, John Nichols writes that the attacks based on this distorted one-dimensional portrait of her obscures the fact that Omar has a very wide range of issues that she is interested in.
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In 2000, there were 28.2 million cases of measles and 535,600 deaths. Thanks to massive efforts and vaccines, those numbers started coming down dramatically but more recently measles cases have risen again around the world. It is reported that in the last year alone, it went from 7.6 million cases of measles and 124,000 deaths in 2017 to 9.8 million cases of measles and 142,000 deaths in 2018, most of them children under the age of five.
It should be noted that it was in 1998 that discredited British physician Andrew Wakefield (who was later stripped of his medical credentials) published his now notorious and later withdrawn paper claiming a vaccine-autism link, that the British Medical Journal editorialized as an “elaborate fraud” and credited an investigative journalist Brian Deer with exposing it.
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Much of the major media in the US is privately owned, by individuals, families, or corporations. These media love to insist that they have complete editorial freedom and that the owners do not exert any pressure on them as to what to write about and how. That is of course rubbish. In cases like Fox News, the owner’s wishes are explicit and manifestly followed. But in less overtly propagandistic outlets, editorial control by the owners is exercised more subtly. The editors are selected because their views conform to those of the owners, and that process filters all the way down the line.
But on some occasions, if the issue is important enough to the owner, even that thin mask of editorial independence is ripped away and the owner gives direct orders as to what the editorial line should be. We see that with billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s entry into the presidential race. He is the owner of Bloomberg News and he has made it very clear that his outlet should not criticize him. In an effort to retain a shred of credibility as a news organization, the editor says that they will also refrain from investigating other Democratic presidential candidates.
Bloomberg News is full of talented, meticulous and fair-minded reporters who abhor the decision their bosses made. Mike Bloomberg made clear he wouldn't tolerate critical coverage from his own outlet, so the only choice was quit or execute his wishes.
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) December 2, 2019
I feel sorry for the reporters at Bloomberg News. It is easy for outsiders to say that they should quit. I am sure that many are looking for other jobs where the control is less overt but the job market in media is tight.
(I came across this old blog post of mine from 2005 before I moved to FtB and thought I would repost it because it may explain why I am so skeptical of the way that the US media covers events in other countries. I have edited it slightly because I cannot help editing.)
In July 1983, I lived through a major upheaval in Sri Lanka where rampaging mobs raged through the streets looking for the homes and businesses and members of the minority Tamil community, killing and destroying everything in their path, with the government and the police just standing by doing little or nothing. There was strong speculation that the government had actually instigated and guided the events to serve their own political agenda, but since the government itself was doing the subsequent investigation, one should not be surprised that nothing came of it.
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It is odd how the mainstream media, awash in violence and sexual innuendo, is so squeamish about using accurate terms such as penis and vagina for bodily features. There has been an effort to remove the hesitancy about vaginas by means such as The Vagina Monologues but there seems to still be some hesitancy with regard to penises.
This hesitancy can produce strange results. I was watching an ad on TV that was discussing how to deal with Peyronie’s Disease that affects the shape of penises. Instead of using the word at all or describing the problem in a matter-of-fact way, they used vegetables of different shapes and sizes to make the point
It reminded me of the comic strip The Boondocks some years ago where the grandfather was watching an ad on TV for erectile dysfunction. But instead of saying so, the ad was coy and resorted to circumlocutions such as urging men to use their product so that they could ‘get in the game’. This caused much frustration for the oblivious grandfather who kept asking his world-wise grandson Huey (who knew exactly what was being promoted and why) what the game being played was and being mystified about why the advertisers were not telling him.